The World of Hex Maps
One of the things Open Innovations has become known for is our hex maps or, more correctly, hex cartograms. Hex cartograms are a very useful visualisation technique when the geographies being visualised should be treated equally. For instance, a standard geographic election map of the UK over-emphasises the winners of rural areas because they are much bigger, geographically, even though they are the same size electorally. In this case a hex map would give a more accurate overall impression of the result although at the expense of accurate geography.
Below you can find some example hex visualisations, blog posts we've written, existing hex layouts, and useful hex map tools.
Examples
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UK Data Landscape
2021
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Who has a majority?
2021
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Local Authority COVID-19 hex maps
2020 - 2021
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General Election results
2019
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House of Commons Divisions
2019 -
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House of Commons petitions
2018 -
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Local elections
2018 - 2022
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IoTUK Nation Database
2018
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Housing in Leeds Wards - Capacity for Improvement
2017
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Changes in median home sale prices
2017
Blog posts
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NHS PCNs as a hex cartogram
19 July 2022 - Stuart Lowe
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The Census 2021 hex game
28 June 2022 - Stuart Lowe
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The hex election
18 March 2020 - Stuart Lowe and Giles Dring
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Visualising petition data
21 March 2018 - Stuart Lowe
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2017 General Election hex map
9 June 2017 - Stuart Lowe
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Election hex mapping
8 May 2017 - Stuart Lowe
Layouts
To help create and reuse hex layouts we defined the HexJSON format. Here are some hex layouts that we and others have designed:
NHS Primary Care Networks (2022)
NHS Integrated Care Boards (2022)
UK Wards (2022)
This is a work-in-progress.
UK NUTS3
UK NUTS2
UK Constituencies
UK Upper Tier Local Authorities
UK Local Authority Districts (2023)
UK Local Authority Districts (2021)
UK Local Authority Districts (2020)
UK Local Authority Districts (2019)
UK MSOAs
By the House of Commons Library
Wales Senedd Electoral Regions
Wales Senedd Constituencies
US States
US Congressional Districts
NZ Constituencies
Yorkshire Water Defined Areas
Tools
Whether you want to create a new layout in HexJSON or show some data in a hex layout, we've got tools to help.
Hex Builder
We created this tool to help you build and alter hex layouts from CSV and HexJSON files.
Hexify
A tool to generate a first draft of a hex layout from a GeoJSON file containing polygons.
Javascript library
A small Javascript library for displaying HexJSON files in a web page.
Lume package
Create hex layouts in Lume.
A D3 plugin
Oli Hawkins has created a plugin to read HexJSON files with D3.js.
External
A HTMLWidget for R
Tony Hirst wrote a series of blog posts which describe a HTMLWidget that renders HexJSON for R.
External